Got in the car and drove to Jersey City. Met with the new President of Saint Peter’s University. Wanted help with a speech. Big doings. Major fundraising event that night, and it was raining cats and some dogs too. Arrived. … Read More »Blinded by the Light
You may not have noticed, but Vice President Kamala Harris made a pretty good speech on November 7th, 2020. It was good because it got right to the point. She started with the pitch, not with the wind up. She… Read More »A Wealth of Information
Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller, an American evolutionary psychologist, notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. And… Read More »Presenting is Seducing
It was raining in the park. Trees were tossing their leaves and the wind was blowing hard. On Psy Blog that morning I learned that a twenty- to thirty-minute walk in nature could release a whole lot of stress, so… Read More »Michelin Tire Man
Effective communicators are aware that persuasion is a high-wire act–it requires precision and balance. Or it’s like Olympic figure skating. You practice your message until you know every micro move you’re going to make, and you pray that you don’t… Read More »19 Paradoxical Things Good Presenters Do
A few days ago I got yanked out of my routine. JURY DUTY! Up early, navigating through a driving rain to Newark, New Jersey in bumper-kissing traffic. Idling in line, as my fellow jurors picked parking slots, I crept up… Read More »Jury Duty is a Pain, Except…